Norton on the canvas for a ten count, again.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/202...ony-and-scandal

Shame they had to drag so many unsuspecting innocents with them if that story tells the truth.

Quote:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/202...ony-and-scandal

WOW! A storyline filled with con men and victims. Ya gotta feel for the pension fraudulents and the people who have payed monies down, only to receive worthless paper promises.

Reads like a true story to me. These people are screwed.

Champagne dreams on a beer budget with pie in the sky plans during a declining motorcycle market. What could possibly go wrong?

Yep, bottom line would be if you can't afford to build an inventory should you really be in business? The Norton knockoffs company couldn't afford to build ahead and had to charge a huge unit cost to stay afloat. There was nothing about the motorcycles that warranted the unit cost of them.

I don't think anybody cares about yesteryear unless they can go to a dealer and look at the bikes, pay money and ride it away. Triumph comes to mind. Then, once at a dealer they have to be competitive.

They also were not diverse as Triumph is, Triumph has a little something for most riders. Cruisers, classics, muscle, adventure, etc... A mistake HD made putting all their eggs in one cruiser basket. The old diehard HD only guys are dieing off and they have seen financial trouble partly because of it. Very few companies can afford to produce just one high end bike with no lower priced bread and butter type bikes, HD at least had the Sportster and a huge gear income. Thousands who don't even own a bike wear HD gear. You have to be an established company that is already diverse with deep pockets to survive that way like Polaris did with Victory and now Indian. They didn't need to be instantly profitable to survive.

I always expected this .They wanted to be Rolls Royce.They needed more models people [including me]could afford.Throw in all the criminal activity and that's all she wrote! I hope the law does it's job and get's to the bottom of this.

He's not saying much, Nice Ford Focus, Aston,s must be in for a valet. https://www.facebook.com/itvnews/videos/195186221837500/

I talked with Stuart Garner shortly after he purchased Oregonian Kenny Dreer's bankrupted attempt at building a modern Norton motorcycle. This would be around 2008 or so.

This was at the then South Bay Triumph dealership in the Los Angeles area (also no longer in business), and when he was there negotiating with the owner of the place to have him also sell his "soon to come"(which took well over five more years TO come) new modern Nortons.

I asked Garner how he could possibly make a success of this venture after Dreer lost HIS shirt trying to and reminded him that unless he (Garner) had really really REALLY deep pockets and such as has his fellow countryman John Bloor of Triumph's successful revival, I didn't see how he would or could possibly end up achieving a better outcome than Dreer's. And also at the same time was brazen enough to ask where and how he makes his money and enough so in order to have these deep pockets and make this thing a success.

Garner assured me that his income from his fireworks enterprise would be enough. I remember then replying to him that I was very surprised to learn that that sort of business is as profitable as he said it was and as big a financial enterprise enough to support this marque's revival, but he once again assured me it was.

Moral of the story: Always keep a healthy sense of suspicion about everything that's said to you.

(..and as I did the day I met Stuart Garner)

Quote:

I talked with Stuart Garner shortly after he purchased Oregonian Kenny Dreer's bankrupted attempt at building a modern Norton motorcycle. This would be around 2008 or so.

This was at the then South Bay Triumph dealership in the Los Angeles area (also no longer in business), and when he was there negotiating with the owner of the place to have him also sell his "soon to come"(which took well over five more years TO come) new modern Nortons.

I asked Garner how he could possibly make a success of this venture after Dreer lost HIS shirt trying to and reminded him that unless he (Garner) had really really REALLY deep pockets and such as has his fellow countryman John Bloor of Triumph's successful revival, I didn't see how he would or could possibly end up achieving a better outcome than Dreer's. And also at the same time was brazen enough to ask where and how he makes his money and enough so in order to have these deep pockets and make this thing a success.

Garner assured me that his income from his fireworks enterprise would be enough. I remember then replying to him that I was very surprised to learn that that sort of business is as profitable as he said it was and as big a financial enterprise enough to support this marque's revival, but he once again assured me it was.

Moral of the story: Always keep a healthy sense of suspicion about everything that's said to you.

(..and as I did the day I met Stuart Garner)

I think you hit the nail on the head early and spot on. But, I wonder if Garner took a hit on Norton. I think maybe suppliers, pre-orders and smaller investors took the hit along with the government. Thinking maybe Garner himself kept his kinda open, kinda not getting paid to appear to be a business.

I keep wondering where he hid the money. I think he may have succeeded in exactly what he set out to do. Make money on a dead marque then leave it for dead.

Quote:

Quote:

I talked with Stuart Garner shortly after he purchased Oregonian Kenny Dreer's bankrupted attempt at building a modern Norton motorcycle. This would be around 2008 or so.

This was at the then South Bay Triumph dealership in the Los Angeles area (also no longer in business), and when he was there negotiating with the owner of the place to have him also sell his "soon to come"(which took well over five more years TO come) new modern Nortons.

I asked Garner how he could possibly make a success of this venture after Dreer lost HIS shirt trying to and reminded him that unless he (Garner) had really really REALLY deep pockets and such as has his fellow countryman John Bloor of Triumph's successful revival, I didn't see how he would or could possibly end up achieving a better outcome than Dreer's. And also at the same time was brazen enough to ask where and how he makes his money and enough so in order to have these deep pockets and make this thing a success.

Garner assured me that his income from his fireworks enterprise would be enough. I remember then replying to him that I was very surprised to learn that that sort of business is as profitable as he said it was and as big a financial enterprise enough to support this marque's revival, but he once again assured me it was.

Moral of the story: Always keep a healthy sense of suspicion about everything that's said to you.

(..and as I did the day I met Stuart Garner)

I think you hit the nail on the head early and spot on. But, I wonder if Garner took a hit on Norton. I think maybe suppliers, pre-orders and smaller investors took the hit along with the government. Thinking maybe Garner himself kept his kinda open, kinda not getting paid to appear to be a business.

I keep wondering where he hid the money. I think he may have succeeded in exactly what he set out to do. Make money on a dead marque then leave it for dead.

Maybe so Ron, but somehow and even though I didn't buy in the least his idea that the profits from his fireworks enterprise would be sufficient to make his newly acquired Norton venture a long-term success, I did come away from that conversation thinking he had reasonably honest and sincere intentions about the whole thing, anyway.

(...ya know, sometimes those guys who DO have those "deep pockets" can ALSO at the same time possess way too much ego and an unclear grasp of reality, don't ya?!)

Cash flow is everything on a new venture. Especially on a product that takes a long time to reach the market.

Didn't Triumph produce low production boutique bikes between the 70s and 90s till Bloor could get the mass production sh*t together?

Quote:

Cash flow is everything on a new venture. Especially on a product that takes a long time to reach the market.

Didn't Triumph produce low production boutique bikes between the 70s and 90s till Bloor could get the mass production sh*t together?

The old Triumph Co-Op actually still produced a fairly significant number of bikes once they took over operation in the mid-'70s and until the mid-'80s, Mac.

However, when that operation then too went into receivership and when Bloor purchased the rights to the marque, he did have the Les Harris company produce a small number of Bonnevilles until he got his new factory up and running in 1990, and presumably from what I understand for the purpose of being able to claim the Triumph marque had been "in continuous operation since its founding in 1902".

Dwight, you are right that he may have had good intentions. Then I think about the pensions that were placed in Norton hands and not returned, a few folks arrested for fraud. I dunno. This article got me thinking that after a decade everybody was still losing their shirts and nearly every promise was not kept.

Article

The next article makes we wonder a lot about Garner.

Article 2

More of the story on how he got into the business.

Buying Spondon for a song

Yep, seems to be very believable.

https://motorbikewriter.com/norton-sold-indian-tvs-company/